Trust me when I say that there is no enthusiasm. Rather, cautious optimism fueled by the knowledge that a change in the way that regional players have conducted their world politik, any change, stands a good chance of being in the right direction (for a change!).

Although conflict may be in the cards for the region, there is also a good chance that peace may break in Palestine, with a domino of positive effects. Obama sure needs it to keep any chances he may have for reelection alive. A very intersting 2011 indeed it will be!

I have read certain texts that hint a changing situation in the middle/near-east lately, some not resisting sci-fi explanations of it, but I would advise you to restrain your enthusiasm because the game has only just started and we don't really know where it will lead. I personnaly believe that 2011 will be a very crucial year and I'm smelling gun-powder somewhere very near. The heat is on, the pressure has bottled up. Turkey and other countries in the region are taking positions for the aftermath...

You wrote ""How do you disassemble such a huge structure???? Beats me!""

Aristotle came up with the solution 2.500 ago. A revolution, that is a major constitutional change, must take place. So the Turkish people are really the only ones who must take on the challenge. Sept 12 is a small step in the right direction. I hope they take it, though too small to bring about noticable improvement by Western standards.

You wrote ""All that proof you 've come up with to support yor criticism of Turkey seems like, I'm sorry to say, fairytales in the eyes of outsiders, mere details of history...What always matters most is the wider picture.""

I guess I naively subscribe to the notion that these "fairy tales" do make up the wider picture. So we best get the genuine fairy tales for our wider puzzle. It is your obligation as well, as it is mine, to question the validity of the story, who tells it, why, what they have to gain, and most important of all to inquire whether the fairy tale cames from a truly democratic source. Not a tyrant, nor a fascist, but from a collective entity that first through a democratic (in substance, not just name) process scrutinizes the story so that the rest of us with a high degree of comfort can accept its genuineness.

""As long as Turkey retains a most favoured nation status in western strategic thinking, all these things about her you've been pointing out, won't really matter to most.""

I'm personally aware of the role the amred forces have played in Turkey. It's a huge and complecated apparatus, a state-within-a-state, seen as something sacred, loved by the people and caressed by the regular state. It has a mind of its own and it controls many aspects of life in Turkey, being a key player in its economy. It employes thousands and thousands of people. It is a factor in state desision making! How do you disassemble such a huge structure????

As long as Turkey retains a most favoured nation status in western strategic thinking, all these things about her you've been pointing out, won't really matter to most.

When you argue about how wrong Turkey has been and how right you lot are, the outsider will have a very hard time making out who's to blame in any case, or who's been wronged. All that proof you 've come up with to support yor criticism of Turkey seems like, I'm sorry to say, fairytales in the eyes of outsiders, mere details of history...

Give us a fire-arm, put us in a very tense situation in which relatives or friends have been killed, pump us up with a good dose of propaghanda, and you have a good chance of turning us into patriotic murderers. That includes you and me. I agree.

The point is that Turkey is different at the top from any other European nation. It has been since its inception, but one was hoping that after the formation of the UN things would improve. They haven't.

Fascism in Turkey starts at the top, since the military is playing a vital role in the decision making. Even mild Islamists who try to make a difference, must factor in their political calculations the influence exerted by the 'Kemalist' fascists and thus the result is less than optimal, leading to very timid steps towards tru democracy. Keep in mind that these fascists are more than just military, they have developed more like the Japanese keiretsus, with profitable businesses which undertake contracts given out by the state and the armed forces, which they control. Thus they apply a business-like effectiveness to their fascistic designs, whether that's mantaining the "threat" of the country breaking up, or the Greeks,the Armenians etc. Maintaining the enemies is an integral part for their existence's justification. Thet will stop at nothing & they have the means to implement their will.

It is one thing being a fascist at the individual level, and it is totally another if you are in a position to apply your fascistic instincts against groups of people, be it the Kurds or the Cypriots or the Turkish people itself, as the latest Balyoz and related fiascos have revealed.

Turkey is between Scylla and Charybdis, namely military fascism and religious fascism. I personally hope that neither beast devours her.

Some people's comments have a fascist scent. When they get carried away by a conversation and when provoked, these kind of people reveal themselves. If you give them a fire-arm and you put them in a very tense situation in which relatives or friends have been killed and if you also give them a good dose of propaghanda, you 've turned them into patriotic murderers, who might some day even receive a medal and get a state allowance...

We are all hiding a fascist thug somewhere deep in our subconscious. He'll come out when the time's right, in the right cisrcumstances. If you think that Greeks and other so cal' 'civilised nations' are immune to thuggery, you are under an illusion. When Greeks had a chance to, they did exhibit wild-boar behaviour(Cyprus events prior to the Turkish intervention, the Kresna fiasco invasion, the burning of Strumica prior to withdrawal). The French gendarmerie overseas expedition force showed how inhumane the French can be during operations against the Algerian insurgency. What-ever happened to the Prussian-German military ideal during loosing phases of WW2? Burned in the (...)ashes? The history of all civilised nations is filled with such examples. Turkey is a little behind and is still prone to violence, albeit institutionalised and justified in the eyes of her citizens, in law-enforcement and in dealing with her own strategic threats...

""As one Turkish friend put it (a man who has spent many years in America, and thus grasps the depth of the cultural chasm), “It’s not that they’re bad. They don’t even know they’re lying.” ""

""People in Turkey see “truth” as something plastic, connected more to emotions than to facts or logic. If it feels true, it is true. What’s more, feelings here tend to change very quickly—and with them, the truth.""

""It was about my failure to show the man the proper respect. I’m not sure my Turkish friends were right about that, though. They are, after all, Turkish, so they pretty much say whatever sounds good to them at the time. They tend to explain these situations ex post facto with appeals to the subtleties of Turkish culture, but the story never stays the same.""

""The Turkish diplomat Namik Tan put it to me this way ... “The West must understand,” he said, “that in this region, two plus two doesn’t always equal four. Sometimes it equals six, sometimes ten. You cannot hope to understand this region unless you grasp this.” You might think he meant this metaphorically, but in my experience this is literal. If someone here feels very strongly that he wants two plus two to make ten (or two o’clock to be ten o’clock, in the case, say, of a promise to deliver goods or services on a deadline), then—voilà!—that’s what it means, and there is an emotional truth to it, in the mind of the speaker, that is morally more important than any literal truth. ""

""This is so common that no one thinks of it as lying, in the sense that it is not viewed as unethical. It is just being polite. They assume you know they’re not being truthful, and they expect you to be lying as well, so it all evens out.""

""These aspects of the Turkish national character have obvious significance to anyone who doubts the world would be better off with the Persian Gulf under an Iranian nuclear shield, and all of southern Europe and the Middle East within striking distance of nuclear-tipped Iranian missiles, which is to say, anyone rational, which is to say, not the prime minister of Turkey, who is, obviously, Turkish, and says pretty much whatever sounds good to him at the time.""

""The utter irrationality of Turks—and the utter uselessness, for them, of our Western notions of truth and logic—are points Americans won’t grasp unless they’ve lived here quite some time—and even then they won’t grasp them, because they make no sense.""

""No one in the Turkish press is asking why a boat with civilian women and children on board was sent to break a military blockade, or why that blockade was imposed in the first place, or how Turkey might have reacted had Israel sent a similar flotilla to deliver uninspected cargo to strongholds of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (the PKK).""

""“Long-term thinking,” however, is not really a Turkish trait. If something works for the next two hours, many a Turkish repairman has assured me, that’s good enough. Foreigners here have a word for the kind of jerry-rigged system Turks like to construct rather than building something that might still work in ten years’ time: Turknology.""

""The emotions are the facts. Stranger still, Erdogan almost certainly truly believes that the objections are rooted in envy. He too assumes everyone lives in a world like his, one in which the emotions are the facts, and it is not an incidental point that in Turkey envy is a particularly important emotion. Envy of the West—in tandem with envy’s sibling, resentment—has certainly helped define modern Turkey, so it could truly seem plausible, in his mind, that the sentiment runs both ways.""

""From an anthropological point of view, this is all very interesting and curious. From a strategic point of view, it’s a disaster—for the West, of course, but much more so for Turkey, which will find out soon enough that whatever anyone might feel, two plus two does equal four, every single time, and the difference between half and all the uranium is actually quite significant.

What should the West do? Beats me. All I know is that calmly pointing this out will have absolutely no effect.""
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I have no doubt Hazmataz that you are telling the "truth". Your Turkth however is so distorted that the two of us will never see eye to eye until such day that you decide to give up your convenient Turkonolgies.

Last, I know that the article in question pleases many in the anti-Erdogan camp. But still, it descriibes your reality from someone who knows you well, a reality whose effects the rest of us also must live with. Especially those of us who have been subjected to this twisted logic of the Turks since 1950s and are still waiting for the Eurasians to pack and get THE HELL OUT OF OUR HOMES!

You still have answered NOTHING on the issues raised, you just repeat yourself! No originality I'm afraid.

So if a criminal gets away with murder because of connections etc, does this mean (in your turkish way of thinking) that ALL CRIMINALS SHOULD GET AWAY WITH MURDER?

So Turkey should continue to violate human rights in Turkey (Kurds, a\levis, religious minorities), occupy Cyprus, continue war crimes (eg colonisation of Cyprus), deny the Armenian Genocide (I think Orhan Pamuk, who even apologised for it even on YOUR behalf, should be a bit more objective tan someone working for the Turkish Propaganda Ministry, don't you think?)...Turkey should also refuse to arrest Omar Bashir, the Sudan President, wanted for the Darfur genocide, right (because he is a Moslem, killing non-Moslems)???

Yes, many violations of international law happen/happened in Iraq, afganistan, Bosnia etc; so, with your "Eurasian" mentality, you are saying IT IS FINE, LET'S HAVE THE LAW OF THE JUNGLE AND THE STRONGER KILLS THE WEAK?

Haze-man wrote:
"b) Both sides have been suffered, killed, tortured, raped and listed as missing".

This is why you will never be European or understand how Europeans think...

You compare tit-for-tat ethnic killings between armed extremists from village to village, between neighbours sometimes (Cyprus 1963-4), a bit like Rwanda - with total dead and missing over 10 years at less than 1000 WITH:
THE 2ND BIGGEST ARMY IN NATO ATTaCKING A COUNTRY 100 TIMES SMALLER IN 1974, AND IN 5 DAYS IN JULY-AUG 1974 (rest was ceasefires but still the Turkish violated it anyway) KILLING 6000 CIVILIANS (INCL. CHILDREN), POWs and raping HUNDREDS OF WOMEN; ETHNICALLY CLEANSING 200,000 GREEKCYPRIOTS AND OCCUPYING THIS COUNTRY IN CONTRAVENTION OF INTERNATIONAL LAW AND COLONISING IT WITH TURKS FROM THE MAINLAND, WHO KICK OUT THE TURKISHCYPRIOTS IN WHOSE NAME/PRETEXT THE INVASION WAS MADE...

And here is how it ends:
...
What Turkey is getting out of it, hard though this is for Americans to grasp, is the feeling that a happy deal has been concluded, and even more importantly, the feeling that Turkey matters. As one commenter on the English Web site of the Turkish newspaper Hurriyet put it, “For the first time Turquey [sic] is showing to all the world that it can propose serious solutions to problems that neither US nor the West could solve it. Turquey is becoming a big and powerful nation who deserves respect and proud.” It is irrelevant, in this universe, whether the solutions are, in reality, serious. Few people here are thinking that deeply about it. Most are just thrilled that the world must now pay attention to Turkey—and tickled that the West doesn’t like it. Of course, there are some people here who are thinking deeply about the ramifications of these policies, and they’re terrified. “We’re going to lose everything we’ve worked for like this,” one acquaintance said to me. “We’ll end up back in the Stone Age.”

Critics of the deal “are envious,” Prime Minister Erdogan declared, “because Brazil and Turkey brokered and pulled off a diplomatic success that other countries had been negotiating without result for many years.” It doesn’t matter that he didn’t pull it off either, or that what other countries had been trying to achieve, in proposing similar exchanges, was a deal in which Iran agreed to stop enriching the damned stuff altogether. The emotions are the facts. Stranger still, Erdogan almost certainly truly believes that the objections are rooted in envy. He too assumes everyone lives in a world like his, one in which the emotions are the facts, and it is not an incidental point that in Turkey envy is a particularly important emotion. Envy of the West—in tandem with envy’s sibling, resentment—has certainly helped define modern Turkey, so it could truly seem plausible, in his mind, that the sentiment runs both ways.

From an anthropological point of view, this is all very interesting and curious. From a strategic point of view, it’s a disaster—for the West, of course, but much more so for Turkey, which will find out soon enough that whatever anyone might feel, two plus two does equal four, every single time, and the difference between half and all the uranium is actually quite significant.

What should the West do? Beats me. All I know is that calmly pointing this out will have absolutely no effect. I, after all, can’t even persuade a Turk to send an e-mail on time. Even when he promises.

Claire Berlinski is a novelist, journalist, and biographer. Her most recent book is There Is No Alternative: Why Margaret Thatcher Matters.

Here is how it starts:
As the First General Law of Travel tells us, every nation is its stereotype. Americans are indeed fat and overbearing, Mexicans lazy and pilfering, Germans disciplined and perverted. The Turks, as everyone knows, are insane and deceitful. I say this affectionately. I live in Turkey. On good days, I love Turkey. But I have long since learned that its people are apt to go berserk on you for no reason whatsoever, and you just can’t trust a word they say. As one Turkish friend put it (a man who has spent many years in America, and thus grasps the depth of the cultural chasm), “It’s not that they’re bad. They don’t even know they’re lying.”

My friend is right, and his comment suggests a point about Turkish culture that I doubt many Westerners grasp. People here—and, I would guess, throughout the Middle East and Mediterranean, though Turkey is the only country I know well—see “truth” as something plastic, connected more to emotions than to facts or logic. If it feels true, it is true. What’s more, feelings here tend to change very quickly—and with them, the truth.

...

Hazmataz, in comparison I am not that bad, am I?

Read it. It will explain our lack of progress in these debates. We will keep at it anyway I am sure!

BenLondon, sure I can, if you and your comrades allow me to answer your personal questions! As a British Armenian, you have the habits of exaggerating the history and provoking the world against the Turkish people, like in the case of the so-called Armenian G-word. I know, old habits die hard, ha!

Others, There are some Turkish Kurds who fought in Cyprus too. I have already given you many materials to read! I think that is enough for the next year or so.

In simple terms;

a) Occupation of 36.2% of territory; the Greeks and Greek Cypriots have underestimated the Turkish Cypriot vise-president and the Turkish Cypriot minority during the establishment of the constitution of the Republic of Cyprus. In the case of Enosis, the Turkish side’s policy was to implement Taksim/Seperation of the Island. After the first operation, 8% was occupied. At Geneva conference on 9 August 1974, the Greek side expressed its ‘readiness to return immediately to the 1960 Constitution and set up a government with the Turkish Cypriot community, the Turkish Vice-President assuming his functions and powers thereunder’, The Turkish side, on the other hand, made a proposal for a new constitutional settlement, which envisaged ‘a bizonal geographic federation’, containing six Turkish administered zones that would encompass about 30% of the island’s territory. US and UK had backed up the Turkish proposal as well. The conference ended in failure. The second operation began and the 36% of the island was occupied.

b) Both sides have been suffered, killed, tortured, raped and listed as missing.

Hazmataz, from what I have seen the Economist has deleted only your very long copy and pasted paragraphs. Your facts do not explain why Turkey seized 38% of the best part of the island for 18% of the population, killed thousands, committed hundreds of documented rapes and left over 1000 missing to this day.

I agree with you and this can be seen in my notes. The Turkish people including the 36 ethnic minorities will benefit from the 12 September reforms. The PM Erdogan has said ‘The reforms package in 12 September will be the beginning of the Turkish politics favouring the Turkish public. The major reforms/new constitution is our main plan from 2011 elections’ 18-8-2010.